Archive/File: orgs/german/treptow-comrades/press/der-spiegel.971222
Last-Modified: 1997/12/29
Germany: Report Details 'Growing Militancy' Among Neo-Nazis
Hamburg Der Spiegel in German 22 Dec 97 pp 37-38
Staff report: "An Explosive Climate"
The raid was something of a routine affair, but the material
that was seized was out of the ordinary. When police
investigators came to search the homes of members of the
Berlin "Treptow Comrades," in addition to knives and tear-
gas guns, they found the materials needed to construct pipe
bombs.
Twenty-year-old Carsten M. and 17-year-old Patrick D. were
remanded in custody. D. admitted that he and his buddy had
been planning an attack on a young PDS [Party of Democratic
Socialism] member. A bomb was to be detonated on the man's
balcony. The two right-wing extremists are accused of
having carried out open-air trial explosions in preparation
for the attack.
According to Eduard Vermander, head of the Berlin Office for
the Protection of the Constitution, right-wing bomb-makers
add a "new dimension" to the neo-Nazi scene in Germany,
which the secret service considers to be "very critical."
There is a growing danger that right-wing terrorists will
launch a campaign of violence modeled on that of the Red
Army faction (RAF).
At the beginning of December, police officers found bomb-
making materials at the Lechrain barracks in Landsberg,
Bavaria, and concluded that right-wing extremist Bundeswehr
soldiers were involved. Officers from Fuerstenfeldbruck
police headquarters found weapons, ammunition, chemicals,
fuses, a device for launching a "Milan" anti-tank missiles
as well as bomb-making plans.
The secret services were alarmed by the discovery at
Landsberg am Lech, where Hitler once worked on "Mein Kampf"
while serving a prison sentence. Franz Gruber, spokesman
for the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the
Constitution, says that the secret service assigns "great
attention" to any attempts made by neo-Nazis to acquire
weapons and explosives.
The intelligence services are unable to check the trend
toward greater militancy within the various right-wing
groupings of young men. The "Treptow Comrades," formed in
1995, has about 30 members and is the largest of the 11 such
neo-Nazi associations in Berlin. They group together about
120 fascist militants.
Officials of the FAP [Liberal German Workers Party], which
was banned by the federal interior minister in February
1995, have played a key role in establishing the Treptow
group. Detlef Nolde, formerly a Berlin FAP "head of
training," was leader of the Treptow group for years. The
members of the fascist cell -- school students, apprentices,
and skilled manual workers aged between 18 and just over 30
-- see Germany as being dominated by "foreign powers" whose
goal is "the biological destruction of the German people."
Thus, in their pamphlet "Who We Are and What We Want," in
which they set out their views, the comrades call for the
"punishment of all those who collaborate" with hostile
powers. Nolde had the young right-wingers form a kind of
leisure time Gestapo, tasked with drawing up a black list of
political enemies, "extending from PDS mayors through left-
wing journalists to 'anti-fascist' roughnecks."
However, the gaunt fanatic ended up in jail for assaulting
two of his comrades. On 17 April, Nolde and neo-Nazi Lutz
Schillok attacked two comrades in Berlin. Schillok stabbed
the two and was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment by the
Berlin district court. Nolde was also convicted and has to
spend two years behind bars for aggravated assault. The
former FAP man was already convicted back in 1996 of
"forming an armed band" and ordered to pay a fine.
Since the stabbing of the two comrades, the Treptow group
has become a cause of concern within the movement itself,
even for dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers. Frank Schwerdt,
the 54-year-old head of that wing of the Berlin right-wing
extremist scene that seeks to operate within the law, read
the riot act to the comrades at a crisis meeting last week
and spoke of a "bunker mentality that has to be overcome
urgently."
Members of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution
estimate that there are between 50 and 100 militant neo-
Nazis across the country who have the mental and technical
ability to engage in acts of terrorism. Security experts
are particularly concerned about a dozen or so right-wing
Rambos, who fought on the Croatian side in the Yugoslav
civil war at the beginning of the 1990s.
Some thoughtful members of the service, such as those in
North-Rhine Westphalia, fear that the application of too
much pressure on the neo-Nazis by the state will encourage
rather than check any propensity for committing acts of
violence: "We do not have a right-wing terrorist group yet,
but we might have one soon," says a member of the secret
service at the Interior Ministry in Duesseldorf.
The politicians who determine security policy face a
dilemma: lifting the ban on neo-Nazi organizations that wave
flags in front of television cameras and then damage the
country's reputation throughout the world is out of the
question. On the other hand, fascist terrorism could pose
more of a danger than the small right-wing parties ever did.
A concept for action based on that of RAF is already
circulating on the right-wing extremist scene. Federal
prosecutors have already filed an indictment against neo-
Nazis Christian Scholz, 31, and Henry Fiebig, 34, accusing
them of attempting to form a terrorist organization.
The Karlsruhe prosecutors, who worked together with the
Federal Office of Criminal Investigations (BKA) on an
investigation that lasted four years, also charge that the
two produced and disseminated a four-part publication ("A
Movement Under Arms") from 1989 through 1991. Since 1993,
the publication has been sold by the NSDAP [Nationalist
Socialist Workers Party of Germany] Overseas Organization
through a mailbox number in Lincoln in the US state of
Nebraska. The leader of that group is German-American Gary
Lauck, who is currently in Hamburg serving a four-year
prison term for breach of the peace and incitement to racial
hatred offenses.
The author of the pamphlets used the pen-name "Hans
Westmar," which was the name of a 1933 propaganda film about
Berlin SA [Storm Troopers] leader Horst Wessel, who was
murdered by a pimp.
"Hans Westmar" advocates the "formation of a suitable
werewolf cadre" for the "organization of an armed struggle"
aimed at "destroying the Jewish system." The fascist
guerrilla handbook, which BKA investigators consider a
"tightly drawn up concept," describes numerous operational
goals for right-wing terrorists.
Thus, "Westmar" calls for the targeted "destruction of the
broadcasting facilities of establishment media," hostage-
taking, arson attacks, and bank robberies "to provide
operational groups with a degree of financial leeway."
The neo-Nazi book of tips for the terrorist expresses
respect for the Red Army Faction. "Westmar" acknowledges
that they "recognized the principles for the urban
guerrilla's waging of an armed underground campaign" and
those are valid "irrespective of the political convictions
held."
However, "Westmar" advises that in contrast to the RAF,
fascist activists should not completely submerge themselves
in illegality. It is far more appropriate for the "werewolf
of the future" to be a "weekend and leisure time terrorist."
Scholz, whom investigators suspect of being the main author
of the work, was an FAP official in Lower Saxony at the end
of the 1980's and considered a fanatical slave driver. In
1990, he left the organization and, like Fiebig, joined the
Nationalist Offensive, which was banned at the end of 1992.
In June 1993, he and his buddy Fiebig gave a demonstration
of what form a "movement under arms" could take. About 250
left-wing radicals tried to storm Fiebig's apartment,
located close to the "Rote Flora" anarchist center in
Hamburg's Schanzen district. Fiebig, who was in the
apartment along with Scholz, at first fired flares at the
attackers and then leaned out of the window with a sawn-off
shotgun. Only later did it transpire that the weapon was
just a decorative item.
In the same year, Scholz went on to become "editor" of the
"HNG News," published by the "Relief Organization for
Nationalist Political Prisoners" (HNG), where he indulged in
fantasies of violence remarkably similar to those of "Hans
Westmar."
In the best "Westmar" style, he wrote, for example, that the
"establishment's organs of repression" have "created a
political climate that is truly explosive." It may happen
that "fires will rage somewhere" soon and that the "air will
become thick with the sound of explosions."

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